Epidemiology (SVUEK_062)
About Study Course
Objective
To provide basic knowledge in epidemiology necessary to understand findings of health research and to apply principles of evidence-based medicine, as well as to develop scientific, systematic and analytic thinking.
Prerequisites
Knowledge of human normal physiology and pathology, and propaedeutic; basic arithmetics.
Learning outcomes
Upon successful completion of the course students will be able to:
• State the historic development of the concept of epidemiology and its current understanding, list the future challenges.
• Interpret the concepts of risk factor, cause and confounder in the context of multifactorial theory of causation.
• Define epidemiologic measures of disease occurrence and to describe their advantages, disadvantages and methods of calculation.
• Explain the meaning of age-standardisation.
• List and describe epidemiologic study designs, their characteristic features, advantages and disadvantages.
• List the main types of biases and to give their explanation.
Upon successful completion of the course the students will be able to:
• Calculate the basic epidemiologic measures of health events and states.
• Calculate measures of association.
• Calculate sensitivity, specificity and predictive values of diagnostic tests.
Upon successful completion of the course the students will be able to:
• Choose health measures, appropriate for the given health problems.
• Assess the suitability of the epidemiologic study design in regard to the research problem.
• Interpret the measures of association.
• Interpret measures of morbidity and mortality in different populations and over time periods.
• Differentiate between exposure variable, other risk factors and confounders under conditions of specific research question and hypothesis.
• Evaluate the evidence for effectiveness of treatment, prevention, health care system and policy.
